I’ve been living life and not writing blogs. It’s been very very long since I’ve sat to process and share, let the words and feelings flow. Where did 2022 go?
Tonight the Academy Awards will air and our efforts to watch as many movies as we could, without the AMC showcase giving us two Saturdays full of Best Pictures, will come to an end tonight. Life has given our movie-watching selves and crew increased responsibilities and relationships so we didn’t have our community commitment to complete immersion. However, as The Terrace, we saw a fair share! All the Best Pictures, a few documentaries and I myself watched almost all the “shorts”. The categories for shorts are Animated, Documentary, and Live Action.
I replaced some 30-minute show streaming to submit to the storytelling done deliberately in these short films. I invited/mandated that my family join me for viewing something we wouldn’t normally know about or seek on our own. As a whole, they are such digestible, powerful, poignant mini-movies.
I watched:
The Night Ride
Stranger at the Gate
The Haulout
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse
My Year of Dicks
The Flying Sailor
Ice Merchants
Le Pupille
To go to a movie, or sit at home and watch a short film, is to enter into the psychological invitation to “suspend disbelief”. To lay aside judgment and realism for reasons of enjoyment, catharsis, or imagination. (see Wikipedia for the historical journey of the phenomenon)
I was grateful I watched how the story, so artistically told, revealed a new way of seeing many familiar experiences. I live a lot of life by what I believe. I also carry around a critical nature to disbelieve often.
When do I suspend my disbelief? Would this practice help me?
I’ve made 2023 a year of less complaining, more breathing, and in general, more appreciating than criticizing. I think Oscar-nominated short films have helped me enter worlds without disbelief or common criticism.
I think I do an okay job of believing others, especially children, the elderly, students, and my family. I have grown in how I suspend my disbelief with some I see as enemies. Even if the outside story isn’t all the way true, if someone shares, I want to believe the underlying effect of the story, what it might say to me, and for sure how they feel.
Suspending disbelief might sound like:
I’ll believe YOU even if you’re different than me.
I’ll believe THEIR SIDE of the story despite not knowing it before.
I’ll wait longer to form my opinion or reject your offering because it’s different or hard to hear at first.
So happy Oscars and I do recommend the shorts. Suspend your disbelief and enjoy the surprise, sadness, and new perspectives.
And then we can go back to sitcoms 🙂
Written March 12th, 2023
